Though Haiti sits in the sparkling Caribbean, its location in a dominant hurricane track is tragic. In 2008 alone, hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hannah, and Ike killed 800 people and laid waste to over 70 percent of Haiti's agricultural land. Catastrophic flooding, too, is Haiti’s fate. Even worse, Haiti straddles the fault line between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Disaster strikes without warning.

And then there’s its tortured history. Hunger ravages Haiti. The last 500 years have beget a people so impoverished, a country so helpless, that no country deals worse with disasters. Visit the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country and you’ll see “te”—cakes made of clay, salt, oil, and water—a desperate stopgap to an appalling hunger that drives children to beg for scraps.